Tuesday 15 January 2008

Tobacco companies meet their match in Nigeria?


Photo by Flickr user lanier67. Creative Commons Licence

From The Guardian

While tobacco sales have been declining in Europe and the USA, tobacco companies have increasingly been targeting the developing world (as mentioned by Elaine in the comments to my post about Procter & Gamble). The World Health Organisation estimates that consumption in developing nations is increasing by 3.4% per year.

Nigeria is now launching a lawsuit against three multinational cigarette companies, accusing them of targeting young people to make up for the declining sales in elsewhere. The government has banned billboard advertising for cigarettes, and radio advertising until after 10:00 pm but little else. By contrast South Africa has strict advertising laws and prohibits smoking in public places. Kenya too has banned smoking in public places.

2 comments:

  1. Good to see people fighting back against BigNicotina.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Ah, yes. We need more campaigns pointed to the young people. We had many in the 70's over here and the smoking went down, now when there is no such campaigns, it's increasing again. Especially among young girls. Not good at all. We don't need to encourage smoking!

    ReplyDelete

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